Month August 2015

Last week, during a very pleasant day-long excursion with my friend Kris to assorted antique malls along Georgia Highway 78, I bought myself a dictionary stand.

I’ve been actively looking for one of these things for at least five years, so I was excited to finally locate one I could afford – and this one even has wheels on it!

As I unloaded from my trusty pickup truck this yet-another-object that I still haven’t found a permanent place for in my already crowded tiny house, I realized that my excitement about finally owning a dictionary stand was probably due to something other than merely having a place to store my ancient (i.e., long out-of-date) and hefty unabridged dictionary.

As so many of the things I own seem to be for me, this piece of furniture – or, more precisely, the dictionary now displayed upon it – is not so much a practical matter as it is a symbolic one.

For me, an unabridged dictionary is very likely a stand-in for my life-long awe for the centuries-old adventure of human scholarship. The dictionary is also emblematic of the miracle of human language – and in particular, the miracle of the written word. My respect and gratitude for the efforts of scholars like Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster is really respect and gratitude for the legions of researchers in every field of scholarly endeavor – especially for the wordsmiths (including biographers) who have publicized or otherwise kept alive the words of the poets, novelists, essayists, historians, philosophers, journalists and others whose word-bearing books have so indisputably and permanently enriched my life.

And underneath my admiration for the hosts of plodding seekers-after-knowledge throughout the centuries lies my veneration of the alphabet itself.

My fascination with the (English) alphabet became obvious fairly early, in my idle doodlings in the margins of my notebooks as an often-bored schoolboy. (Highly stylized medieval castles were about the only things besides obsessive strings of alphabets that I can remember scribbling in those notebooks.)

My reverence for alphabets – and, eventually, words and the meanings and histories of words, and the spells they can weave – doubtless predisposed me what would become a voracious reading habit, but is also probably responsible for my enthusiastic appreciation of the art of calligraphy, something that floated into my awareness sometime during my high school years and eventually morphed into another lifetime hobby.

At any rate, an unabridged dictionary was something that even as a kid I knew I wanted to own when I grew up, and I didn’t wait long before buying one (second-hand, of course, as the price was right). I’ve lugged the tome I bought from house to house during many moves over the years.

A wise decision, too, as that dictionary has often come in handy during the hundreds of games of Scrabble I’ve always eagerly played over the years – not to mention the dictionary’s usefulness in solving some of the hundreds of crossword puzzles I’ve enjoyed working. (Incidentally, I can guarantee you that an unabridged dictionary is essential for anybody who decides to read the novels of Lawrence Durrell.)

In short, the dictionary has been – or represents, anyway – a vital center of many of my interests or preoccupations, leisure ones and otherwise. And now, at long last, I have a sort of altar for it.

I don’t remember now who it was who first told me about cucumber water, or even when or where I first read something about it. I am grateful to whoever he/she/it was, as this summer I’ve been enjoying consecutive batches of this amazingly tasty and refreshing beverage.

How could something so refreshing, so tasty, so inexpensive, and – most importantly – so easy to make have escaped my notice for 67 years??? Up until recently, I relied almost exclusively on iced tea to get my often-thirsty self through Atlanta’s summers, with an occasional foray into homemade (or, more often, store-bought) lemonade or limeade.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing superior to a tall glass of perfectly made iced tea. (“Perfectly made” meaning, for me, chemically balanced: exactly the right amount of sugar combined with exactly the optimum number of lemon wedges. Woe be to the restaurant server who thinks I’m kidding when I order that absurdly overpriced $2.00 glass of sweet tea “with extra lemons, please,” or who later oblivously re-fills my glass without bringing me additional lemons.)

My life-long habit of drinking sweet iced tea virtually every day was further strengthened recently when I found out I could successfully replicate the iced tea recipes taught me by my sister Gayle (let the teabags steep in the boiled water for as long as you can – several hours instead of a few minutes) and by my friend Moondragon (who routinely brews his using half Lady Grey teabags, half regular).

The Internet abounds in variations of the basic cucumbers-submerged-in-water recipe. I’ve yet to try adding lemon slices and/or mint leaves, or mixing in some carbonated water along with the tap water. At some point I will probably experiment with each of those ideas.. Thus far, however, I’ve been extremely pleased with how wonderful the simplest ingredients – a third of a cucumber, sliced into a glass pitcher and covered with water, then refrigerated – has worked. And so cheap, too!

Incidentally, some of those numerous recipes on the Internet also trumpet the health benefits of cucumber water. (Example.) So that’s another piece of the Good News.

At any rate, for someone as maniacal about tea as I have always been (a daily early morning consumer, even in summer, of a favorite brand of hot tea as well as, at lunch or dinner, iced tea), this recent addition of chilled cucumber water to my daily beverage repertoire is nothing short of revolutionary. I’m especially glad that zero sugar is involved.

I think I’ve finally found a way to drink almost as much water as I’m always being warned I should consume every day. So, yay!

My friend Charles, a fellow member of the Wilderness Network of Georgia, a hiking/camping group for gay men, alerted me yesterday afternoon to the fact that there was a last-minute open slot for a WNG kayaking trip to a not-too-distant state park, the point of the trip being to enjoy from a bunch of rented kayaks a few hours of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

Hard Labor Creek is one of Georgia’s largest reclaimed wilderness areas in the state, and its lake is perfectly suited for kayaks.

Because it had been many years since I’d bothered to stay up late enough to look for meteors, and because the park is located less than two hours from the city, I decided to join Charles and the others. I carpooled with several WNGers, and about two dozen of us rendezvoused for a pre-kayaking supper at a restaurant in the nearest town, Rutledge, Georgia.

Charles’ photo of the WNG folks at the pre-meteor shower restaurant in Rutledge, Georgia

Ian’s photo of some of us about to embark. Sandal-footed Cal and Charles are standing there in the middle of the others.

The photo at the top of this post (grabbed from the Internet) shows the sort of panorama that, under ideal conditions, one might be expected to see. That is hardly the sight that we kayakers beheld last night, however.

In fact, we didn’t see any meteors last night, and though the park ranger guiding our little convoy of kayakers claimed we could faintly see the Milky Way, I think he was mistaking it for a mere passing cloud.

Still, the experience of being out in a boat on the water at night was worth the trouble and the disappointment of seeing zero meteors. The lake water was unexpectedly warm, there were no bugs to speak of (though one of my fellow kayakers reported later that he was briefly set upon at one point by a few bats); before the clouds rolled in after we’d been out on the lake for about a half-hour, we could see plenty of constellations and a planet or two.

One of the oddest parts of this already-unusual-for-me expedition was the fact that a group of horror movie groupies happened to choose last night to rent one of the park’s large campgrounds on the far side of the lake for some sort of Friday the 13th re-enactment. According to the park ranger’s explanation, one can apparently gather ones friends and relatives and, for $100 each, a company of actors and technicians will try to convince the assembled-around-a-campfire throng that they are being attacked by murderers wielding chain-saws. (One of the kayakers remarked that the amplified sounds of the alleged chain-saws sounded more to him like the sounds of a dozen weed-eaters: “The Georgia Weed-Eater Massacre!”)

The glare and the smoke pouring forth from the clearing of the rented campground, together with the electrically-amplified sound-effects and the frenzied screams of the assembled groupies didn’t make for a peaceful idyll out on the lake for us hapless kayakers. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to be out on a lake in the (almost) dark. The tiny glow-light bracelets on each paddler’s wrist and the tiny lights at the tips of all the kayaks was pretty magical, and compensated somewhat for the not-so-distant roar of what sounded like an orgy of human sacrifice or some hapless village being ruthlessly pillaged by marauding Orcs.

So, reader, I am glad I went kayaking last night. This was only the second time I had ever been in a kayak, and gliding along on the lake reminded me of the first time – maybe eight years ago or so ago? – when my friend Terry and I did a road trip through much of Oregon. During the trip, we stopped near Sisters to visit my brother Mike and his wife Inice, and during the visit Mike took Terry and me out for an afternoon of kayaking on a nearby lake.

Calvin kayaking in Oregon

This second outting with a kayak has decidedly convinced me that I really enjoy it, and I look forward to finding further opportunities to spend time in one.

I spent the last week of June 2015 with two friends, Kris Kane and Nancy Ward, on a road trip from Atlanta to Michigan. This was my second week-long road trip since I retired in March 2012; the first one, in the summer of 2012, was a trip down the California coast with my San Francisco-based friend Harvey. I’m hoping that my being retired will allow me to make numerous additional road trips in various parts of the United States – especially since it’s gotten so expensive to travel overseas.

The final destination for our Michigan adventure was the tiny town of Algonac, where Kris grew up. Kris’s long-time Atlanta friends had over the years heard many stories about Algonac, but we apparently had to wait until we retired from our full-time jobs to make the pilgrimage to Kris’s pre-Atlanta haunts.

Before this summer’s trip to Michigan, Nancy, Kris, and I had taken several vacations together (with assorted other friends), including a trip to France in October 2014, a May 2012 trip to Ireland, England, and Wales, a week-long villa rental in Italy a few years before that, and a trip to London a few years before that.

Our road trip to Michigan – a place I’d never seen except for a quick weekend trip to Ann Arbor back in 1970 – included overnight stops in Kentucky on the way up and back. We spent the first segment of our stay in Michigan exploring the side of the state most distant from Algonac: the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. There we spent two nights in the resort town of Grand Haven, our base for day trips to the nearby tourist towns of Saugatuck and Holland. All three of these towns were full of charming shops and restaurants and the weather was great throughout our entire week of traveling. It was impossible (at least for Nancy and I, both southerners) to imagine how everything we were seeing is annually blanketed in snow and/or ice!

Before heading to Algonac for the final part of our trip, we spent a day in East Lansing, where Kris had attended Michigan State University, whose vast campus we explored through the windshield and windows of our car.

It was wonderful to spend an entire week within sight of various bodies of water – multiple rivers, lakes, and canals as well as our stay at Lake Michigan). And we spent one of our final afternoons crossing into Canada and driving alongside more water before taking a car ferry back over to the U.S.

Along the way, we met several sets of of Kris’s relatives and friends, all of them super-friendly. We stayed two nights in Algonac at the home of two of those friends, Angela and Louis.

Besides enjoying the unfamiliar scenery and the pleasant people, we stopped and shopped at several large flea markets, packing Kris’ already loaded-to-the-gills car with various bargain-priced finds.

I took the sunset photo at the top of this blogpost from the front of the motel where we stayed on Lake Michigan; Kris and Nancy took these others:

Cal shopping at a handicraft center in Berea, Kentucky

Some of Kris’s relatives and friends, who we met on our first day in Michigan

Lake Michigan beach scene

Cal and Kris relaxing at our motel across the street from Lake Michigan

A garden in the middle of Saugatuck, where we spent a lovely afternoon shopping and eating

Our last breakfast in Grand Haven, before heading back east to Lansing

Lunching at a restaurant across the street from the campus of Michigan State University

The art museum at MSU – which turned out to be a lot more interesting from the outside than inside

Another restaurant meal, this one near Algonac with another set of Kris’s friends

Our gracious hosts in Algonac, Angela and Lou

View along the Canadian coast drive

The car ferry we used to get back to the USA from our brief foray into Canada

One of Nancy’s Lake Michigan photos

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From Cal’s Commonplace Book

The Constant Reader

Books Read This Year

Updated November 13, 2018

“I continue to think of myself as someone who is essentially a reader—a man who takes a deep pleasure in good books, who views reading as a fine mode of acquiring experience, and who still brings the highest expectations to what he reads. By the highest expectations I mean that I am perhaps a naïve person who has never ceased to believe that books can change his life, and decisively so.” – Joseph Epstein (from Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives [1989], quoted by Patrick Kurp at his blog Anecdotal Evidence)

Just Finished:

Tyrant: Shakespeare and Politics (2018) by Stephen Greenblatt

One of the joys of browsing the New Books shelf at my local library is discovering that one of my favorite authors has published a new book. When I recently stumbled upon Stephen Greenblatt’s latest, I instantly put aside everything else I was reading to start it. Tyrant, like his earlier The Swerve and even earlier Will in the World, is a tour de force. Very little that I’ve read since Mr. Trump was elected President has helped me better cope with this colossal blunder of the U.S. electorate (actually, the Electoral College), but Tyrant helps a lot. Greenblatt wrote it to cope with his own dismay at Trump and his allegedly widespread and numerous supporters. It’s a short book, but it is full of spot-on observations about the parallels between Mr. Trump and Shakespeare’s Richard II, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus. And of course makes me even more impressed with Shakespeare’s penetrating insight into human nature, and Greenblatt’s ability to marshall those insights into such a compelling study.

Currently reading (in addition to trying to keep up with the recent issues of the planet’s two best magazines, The Sun and the New Yorker):

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978) by Barbara Tuchman

Finished earlier this year:

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2009) by Rebecca Skloot

If most nonfiction books were written this well, people would read fewer novels! Once I started this tale (for my book club), it was difficult to put it down until I finished it. It took ten years for Skloot to write this first book of hers; I hope I won’t have to wait that long before she writes another one, so I can read it also, regardless of what she decides to write about. Skloot is that good – and the amount of research that went into her writing is as impressive as her riveting writing style.

Several of this prolific author’s previous bestselling books (The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, The Care of the Soul, A Religion of One’s Own,A Blue Fire: Selected Writings of James Hillman) have been on my To Be Read list, so when I found his latest at the library the other day, I figured I might as well finally get around to reading him – especially since this latest one addressed one of my more recent preoccupations: books about mindful retirement. I can understand why Moore’s books have been so popular: his style is very conversational and his arguments are non-combative and often persuasive, especially when Moore’s explaining Jungian-based theories of meaning (some of which – and with the pronounced exception of dream analysis) have held a long-time fascination for me). But I was surprised to find myself disappointed in this book. Perhaps I’ve already internalized most of the insights and advice on offer here, or I find Moore too repetitive, or both. Since I’ve already bought copies of those other books of Moore’s, I will eventually get around to examining them, but maybe not as soon as I was hoping to?

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (2016) by Sarah Bakewell

If there were ever an ideal book for Calvin to read, this must be it: it’s nonfiction, features multiple historical figures who are legends in the fields of philosophy and psychology (my two college majors and the two subjects that have most enthralled me all my life), told by a master story-teller who had already written another of my favorite books (How to Live: or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer). The full subtitle of the book includes the names of the figures whose lives and works Bakewell covers: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Bakewell’s masterpiece is a perfect blend of difficult concepts rendered understandable, meticulous historical research, fascinating backstories and spellbinding gossip, compelling speculation supported by startling insights – all of it produced in the most engaging prose imaginable. My highest praise for any book is that I know long before I finish reading it that I’m going to want to read it again, and this borrowed library book is one that I will definitely be buying my own copy of.

My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues (2017) by Pamela Paul

This memoir of how an introverted book nerd became editor of the New York Times Book Review is interlaced with remarkably articulate (and often humorous) asides on the pleasures and perils of book love. Paul entertainingly captures the complete range of often difficult-to-describe experiences with reading that every lifetime reader will recognize with glee (or chagrin). I am so glad I found this writer and this book (one of several she’s written).

The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (2008) by Mikita Brottman

Brottman is a psychotherapist and literature professor, and her book is an intriguing tonic for diehard bookaholics like me. The first half of her book, before she ventures more thoroughly into her personal reading habits and history, is the most interesting section, although the entire book held my interest. The striking parallels Brottman draws between the activities (often addictions) of reading and masturbation – and the similarities between the changed social attitudes about both – are compellingly and often amusingly described. Brottman’s humble but erudite writing style is engaging regardless of the specific literary territory she’s surveying, and she surveys a lot of them (e.g., science fiction, Gothic romances, true crime, comic books, psychological case studies). Every chapter of the book contains insights and shocks of self-recognition. The author’s list of works cited and consulted is fascinating, her list of relevant Internet sites is particularly useful), and her Acknowledgements page is as hilarious as it is unusual.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit is one of my favorite living writers, and this is the second time I’ve read this book: I read a library copy nine years ago – and, mortifyingly didn’t remember a word of it, just the fact that I remembered loving it. Late last summer, when I began taking long walks most days to build up my stamina for my then-upcoming trip to Italy, I bought a copy of Wanderlust and am so glad I did. Not only because it took me so long to finish it (I took it with me to Italy, but didn’t get around to as much reading as I’d planned to do), but because Solnit includes so many excellent quotations about walking, which I am planning to add (eventually) to the Commonplace Book posted elsewhere on my blog. Another unusual thing about Wanderlust is how each magnificent chapter could stand alone as an essay on a particular aspect of the history or psychology of walking: one wouldn’t need to read the chapters sequentially. The angles Solnit comes at her subject from are often unexpected ones, and many of her own sentences are also definitely quoteworthy. I won’t be surprised if I decide one day to read this book again for a third time – it’s that rich, that dense with insight and information. And I will certainly track down Solnit’s more recent books, some of which are probably based on screeds on her Facebook page (and elsewhere).

Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995) by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

A whale of a book (563 pages, excluding the notes), but completely enthralling – Richardson’s channeling of Emerson’s motivations and abiding interests are subtle and convincing. I soon got so exasperated at the number of intriguing (and obscure) book titles that Richardson mentions that Emerson read that I ended up buying a copy of the book so I can refer to it more conveniently. (Originally, I obtained my copy of this book from the library, after unearthing, late last year, a review of Richardson’s book that I’d saved from a 1995 (!) New Yorker.) I will definitely be investigating Richardson’s other books, which include a biography of Thoreau. And I am glad I at some point picked up a copy of Emerson’s selected essays, as I am now definitely going to read some of them. What an amazing mind – an authentic pioneer of the intellect – and from now on a personal hero.

I originally read this book ten years ago and recently re-read it after suggesting it to the book club I’m a member of. Shocking as it was to realize I’d forgotten all the details of the story, it was gratifying to find that my fond memories of its being one of those near-perfect novels were reinforced by a second reading. The fact that a former librarian (and her niece) wrote the book, and wrote it in the form of letters and journal entries made its near-perfection even sweeter. Our book club is looking forward to the movie based on the book that’s being released this year, hoping the screenwriter(s) didn’t mangle what is likely one of the most delightful novels you’ll ever read. Plus you’ll learn a lot about the five-year Nazi occupation of this British island, something I was unaware of until I stumbled upon this book.